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Thursday, July 02, 2009

Random thoughts on a Thursday

That headline appeared on the MSN Home Page when I opened it today, and was followed by this: “Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag Pratt shared some controversial views on a radio show earlier this week.

“In a Monday appearance on Alex Jones' radio show, Infowars, the couple revealed they feel 9/11 was an ‘inside job,’ say the idea that global warming exists is ‘mind boggling’ and lament the ‘end of humanity.’”

I’ll have to confess that my reaction was less than charitable: “Who is Spencer Pratt; who is Heidi Montag Pratt; and why should anyone give a tinker’s damn what they think?”

I decided that despite my general feeling of not caring to know the answer to that question I would go to the source of all knowledge, Wikipedia, to see what I could learn, and found this: “Spencer William Pratt (born August 14, 1983) is an American television personality known for his role as the antagonistic husband of Heidi Montag on MTV's The Hills. He is the older brother of Stephanie Pratt, who also appears on The Hills.”

Well, I feel much better now. Just knowing that Spencer and Heidi are involved with MTV confirms my initial reaction of not giving a tinker’s damn, and also explains why I’d never heard of either of them. Or their show.

Then I found an email containing a story that I had read a while back, but had forgotten about that does a great job of explaining the fallacies of liberal-think/socialism.

An economics professor at a local college made the statement to one of his classes that he had never failed a single student before, but had once failed an entire class. That class had insisted that socialism worked, and that in a society where no one would be poor and no one would be rich, life would be wonderful.

The professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on socialism. All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade; no one would fail and no one would receive an A.

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B.

The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.

As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little for the first test had studied even less this time, and the ones who studied hard for the first test decided they wanted a free ride, too, so they also studied little.

The second test average was a D! No one was happy.

When the third test rolled around, predictably, the average was lower, still.

The scores never increased, but the bickering, blame and name-calling did, and the resulting hard feelings meant that no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.

To the students’ great surprise the experiment in socialistic grading resulted in all the students failing the class. The professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because, like sharing grades, when the rewards are great, the effort to succeed is great, but when the rewards are taken away, no one will want t try to be successful.

That’s a pretty effective explanation of how socialism works and why it is evil.